Unsettled

The history of refugees in twentieth-century Britain is hardly known. A map at the beginning of Unsettled reveals how many places in Britain feature in this history, all given the title ‘refugee camp’. Accommodation was in tents or in facilities that were repurposed including workhouses, holiday camps, wartime barracks, internment camps, air bases, and prisoner-of-war camps. Unsettled tells the story of life in these camps and is also about the impact of refugees and camps on local communities and the contexts in which refugees and local populations encountered each other. A striking finding is that homeless Britons sometimes lived in… show more.

I would next like to recommend a recent book that reminds us that, when we think about the proliferation of refugee camps in countries in the Middle East, South-east Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, it is easy to forget that Europe was and is itself home to refugee camps. Indeed, as Jordanna Bailkin (University of Washington) shows in Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, successive British governments established and maintained refugee camps from World War One onwards. These camps facilitated contacts between newcomers – Belgian refugees in 1914, Basques in the 1930s, Poles in the 1940s, Ugandan… show more.